Criminal Injuries Compensation

Julia Lopez Excerpts

Tuesday 29th April 2025 Westminster Hall

[Laurence Turner (Birmingham Northfield) (Lab)]

I beg to move,

That this House has considered compensation for criminal injuries.

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship for the first time, Dr Murrison. At the outset, I thank the members of the Backbench Business Committee for agreeing to allocate this debate and all hon. Members, across parties, who supported the application. I also thank those constituents and members of the public who have been in touch in advance of the debate. Criminal injuries are, by their nature, not easy matters to discuss, so I am grateful to all the people who took the time to recount their experiences.

I am also grateful to all the Members present today, in particular my hon. Friend the Member for Warrington North (Charlotte Nichols), who has already done much in this and the previous Parliament to highlight some of the problems that we will talk about in this debate. It is also good to see the hon. Member for Strangford (Jim Shannon) in his place. I should make it clear that, I will be talking about the criminal injuries compensation scheme as it operates in Great Britain, but I am aware that different arrangements apply in Northern Ireland, and I am glad that that perspective will be represented today.

It is also important at this early stage to pay tribute to the staff of the Criminal Injuries Compensation Authority. Nothing in the opening of this debate is intended as a criticism of them. They work within parameters that are broadly set by us in Parliament, and with staffing numbers that have fallen by 19% since the current iteration of the scheme was introduced in 2012. The civil service people survey reveals that they take pride and find purpose in their jobs, and I am grateful to them.

The question of how the victims of serious physical and mental criminal injury may be fairly compensated has occupied this House for many decades. We are, to the month, at the 60th anniversary of the introduction for the first full year of the original, non-statutory scheme, which was introduced in recognition of the fact that there will always be cases in which the perpetrators of serious violence cannot be identified or awards cannot be recovered from their assets or incomes.

In preparation for this debate, I was delighted to learn of a local connection: the guiding and determined force behind the original scheme was the Birmingham magistrate and first secretary of the Howard League for Penal Reform, Margery Fry, who up to her death was a tireless campaigner for better support for the victims of crime and for the principle that perpetrators must, wherever possible, pay the cost of restitution. Those are principles that I am sure Members on both sides of the House will endorse today.

However, there is another, unhappy point of emerging agreement on the criminal injuries compensation scheme: it does not adequately serve the people it is meant to aid. As the Victims’ Commissioner put it in 2019, victims of violent crime reported

“delays, uncertainty about next steps and poor communication. To many, fairly or unfairly, the Scheme seemed calculated to frustrate and alienate.”

[Julia Lopez (Hornchurch and Upminster) (Con)]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for tabling an incredibly important debate. I came upon this issue recently in dealing with the case of a 10-year-old boy in my constituency who was shot in a quiet residential street. It has taken five years to get him compensated for the injuries that he suffered, which will be lifelong. Does the hon. Gentleman share my concern about the sheer length of time that it takes to get victims compensated, the bureaucratic and sometimes impersonal approach, and the inadequacy of the sums being received by people, particularly children, who have received lifelong injury?

[Laurence Turner]

The hon. Member raises what sounds like a truly shocking case. All my sympathies are with that child and his family. I agree wholeheartedly with the point she makes about timelines and the nature of communication through the scheme, which I—and, I am sure, other Members—will come on to in the course of this debate.

At the time, the Victims’ Commissioner further recommended that the Ministry of Justice

“examine the Scheme with a view to making it simpler and accessible to victims wishing to apply on their own behalf, reducing the reliance on legal representatives.”

Also in the last Parliament, the all-party parliamentary group for adult survivors of child sexual abuse reported that “almost all survivors” who contributed to its inquiry

“had a negative experience of applying to CICA for compensation.”

I recognise that some progress has been made in the last six years, which must be welcomed. The last Government retrospectively removed the “under the same roof” rule for crimes committed between 1964 and 1979. It had long been recognised that the rule prevented the awarding of fair compensation to victims of historical domestic abuse and childhood sexual abuse during that period. Progress has also been made more recently on reducing the paper-bound nature of the scheme.

However, we cannot reassure ourselves that the scheme is in good health. As has been said, victims of violent crime can face long delays before they access compensation. For residents in Birmingham, the average time between application and award is still more than a year. That average can be dragged upwards by the most complex cases, but even apparently simple cases can take many months to resolve. Applicants to the scheme are not effectively signposted to wider support or assisted to navigate the processes for accessing services, such as the diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder through the NHS.

The reasoning that underpins the tariff system is hard to understand, and the apparently arbitrary limits to the scheme can produce outcomes that are, to the layperson’s eye, perverse. The two-year normal claim limit is out of line with the three-year limit for civil claims for injury.